Sweet memories

The other night I could not get to sleep.

Rather than count sheep I tried to recall the great Warwickshire side of the late sixties.

Most of the team came back to me this side of consciousness: Bob Barber, Billy Ibadulla, John Jameson, the two Smiths (A.C. and M.J.K.), Tom Cartwright, David Brown, Jack Bannister.

There must have been a couple of batsmen I forgot.

Bless me if they were one of my boyhood heroes – Rohan Kanhai – and that run machine Dennis Amiss.

Also, of course, was Kanhai’s fellow Guyanese – that supreme spinner that took over 300 Test wickets – Lance Gibbs.

It was not just an excellent cricketing side but one of multi-talented characters.

Bob Barber went to Cambridge University, scored 185 in one day for England at Sydney and made a fortune.

Cartwright was a man of deep socialist principles and picked ahead of D’Oliveira for the tour of South Africa.

He withdrew because of injury but I wonder if his conscience played a role too.

David Brown became a talented race horse trainer. Mike Smith played fly half for England. A.C. Smith became a senior cricket administrator.

On my constitutional yesterday I had a similar moment of non-retrieval which afflicts us senior citizens when I tried to recall those talented South Africans who never got a Test during their country’s years in the wilderness: Mike Proctor, Vincent van der Bijl, Jimmy Cook, Ken McEwan – but I was missing one a Sussex speedster.

I googled and it rankled me as I met him in Cape Town in the Test when Ben Stokes hit 256: Garth le Roux.

He was genuinely fast and in county cricket took the wickets of Somerset’s Ian Botham and Viv Richards in successive innings.

He did play for his country in the England rebel tour.

I wondered if le Roux would make my greatest South Africa XI. I thought he was not as good as A.A. Donald or Dale Steyn.

My team is:

Graeme Smith, Barry Richards, Hashim Amla, Graeme Pollock, Jaques Kallis, A.B. de Villiers, Derek Lindsay, Shaun Pollock, Dale Steyn, A.A. Donald and Hugh Tayfield.